The Steve Jobs MBA Unit 103: Connect your people

This article was taken from the July 2011 issue
of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print
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In 1986 Jobs bought Pixar Animation
Studios from George Lucas for $5 million (the equivalent of £6 million at
today's rates). Jobs was smarting from being forced out of Apple and saw the
fledgling firm as a potential investment. He wasn't interested in
animation -- he was drawn to the Pixar Image Computer, a $135,000
machine capable of generating complex graphic visualisations. But
the expensive computers were a commercial flop, which meant that
Jobs and the Pixar team had to come up with a Plan B.

That back-up plan was making computer-animated movies. Pixar now
has an unprecedented record of commercially and critically
successful films, including Up, WALL·E and
The Incredibles. In 2006, the Walt Disney Company
purchased it for $7.4 billion.

How did Jobs help establish one of the most successful movie
studios of all time? One important factor involves architecture.
The Pixar studios are set in an old canning factory, just north of
Oakland, California. The original design called for three
buildings, with separate offices for the computer scientists,
animators and management. The smaller buildings were cheaper to
build, but Jobs scrapped the plan. ("We used to joke that the
building was Steve's movie," says Ed Catmull, the current president
of Pixar. "He really oversaw everything.") Jobs completely
re-imagined the studio. Instead of three buildings, there was a
single vast space, with an airy atrium at its centre. "The
philosophy behind this design is that it's good to put the most
important function at the heart of the building," Catmull says.
"Our most important function is the interaction of our employees.
He wanted to create an open area for people to always be talking to
each other."

But he needed to force people to go there. He began with the
mailboxes, which he shifted to the lobby, then moved the meeting
rooms to the centre of the building, followed by the cafeteria,
coffee bar and gift shop. Jobs eventually decided to locate the
bathrooms in the atrium. He believed that the best meetings
happened by accident. And he was right. Pixar employees say that
many of their best ideas arrive not while sat at their desk, but
when they're having a bowl of cereal with a colleague or having a
chat in the bathroom.